22 May 2008

Phillies radio silliness

There's a commercial which airs on Phillies radio broadcasts. Since I dislikeComcast, but am addicted to the Internet, I'm willing to pay them for high-speed Internet access but not for cable TV. This means I listen to Phillies games on the radio.

Anyway, there's a commercial for Citizens Bank (who own the naming rights to Citizens Bank Park, where the Phillies play) that regularly airs during these broadcasts. It goes something like this (I'm paraphrasing, but the "math" is correct):

Did you ever notice how important the number seven is to the Phillies? They've won seven National League East division titles. There are seven letters in Ashburn, Schmidt, and Carlton. Thirty-two Hall of Famers played for the Phillies. Divide by the number of runs scored in a grand slam and, yes, you get eight. Subtract the number on Whitey's back and what do you get. Seven!

The voice then proceeds to tell us how Citizens Bank is open seven days a week. Which I suppose would be nice to know if I didn't do basically all my banking at ATMs anyway.

But I think the commercial is intended to make fun of people who jump through hoops like this to make the numbers work out. And seven is a small number and therefore easy to manufacture by the manipulation of other small numbers, or so I noted on July 7, 2007.